You may be using the term Orwellian wrong. Heres what George Orwell was actually writing about – USA TODAY

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri says he is going forward with his objection to the Electoral College results from Pennsylvania. However, he denounced the violent breach at the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump. (Jan. 6) AP Domestic

Chances are, youve seen George Orwells name thrown around a lot in the past week on social media, either by conservatives invoking his name with sincerity or by liberals poking fun at conservatives for its misuse.

On Friday, when Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trumps Twitter account, his son Donald Trump Jr. was quick to invoke George Orwell. We are living Orwells 1984, he tweeted. Free-speech no longer exists in America. It died with big tech and whats left is only there for a chosen few.

When Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster afterWednesdays Capitol Hill riot and his widely perceived role in helping incite it, he had some words for what he called the woke mob at his would-be publisher. This could not be more Orwellian, he tweeted in a statement.

Cheeky Twitter users have been quick to criticize the invocation of Orwell from people who, like many of us, probably havent dusted off a copy of 1984 since high school.

As we all remember, Orwell's 1984 is about an old man who gets banned from a bird-themed social media site after regularly encouraging violence, tweeted the progressive think tank Gravel Institute.

Starting a Go Fund Me to buy conservatives some Orwell books, wrote @ClueHeywood.

My son just described having to clean his room as positively Chorewellian, tweetedTV writerGennefer Gross.

1984 rose to the top ofAmazons top-selling book list over the weekend. On Monday, it reached the No. 1 spot. Not bad for a book published in 1949. Too bad few people citing the books dystopian horrors in earnest seem to understand the usage.

The term Orwellian has become lazy shorthand for exercises of authority with which one disagrees. When a publisher drops your book because your brand has become toxic, its Orwellian. When an internet platform enforces its terms of service and kicks you off, its Orwellian. When a store has you removed from the premises for refusing to wear a mask during a pandemic, its Orwellian.

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It tends to be a kind of catch-all for repression, says David Ulin, associate professor of English at the University of Southern California and former book editor of the Los Angeles Times. He hasread and studied Orwells works extensively, and he finds Hawleys and Trumps Orwell name-checking not just inaccuratebut ironic.

Theres a real irony in the fact that someone who paid such attention to clarity in language Orwells whole thing was about transparency in language, that language needed to be absolutely clear like a pane of glass that a writer like that becomes a rhetorical tool for the people who would have been at the point of his lance, Ulin says.

Its actually almost counter-Orwellian, says Pallavi Yetur, a practicing psychotherapist with a master's degree in creative writing whose critical thesis was on Orwell and how his life experiences formed the way he thought about government. In fact, Donald Trump Jr.s tweet is Orwellian because he is using language as a way to control peoples opinions about something thats happening in his favor, and thats propaganda.

Orwellian is probably the most widely used adjective derived from the name of a writer (Kafkaesque mightcomeclose), yet so many are using it wrong. It helps, first, to understand who Orwell was and the deeply held political convictions that fueled his writing.

George Orwell, author of "1984."(Photo: AP)

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it, Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay handily titled Why I Write. That was the year Orwell joined a leftist militia to fight in the Spanish Civil War against fascist Francisco Francos military uprising in Spain.

Eric Arthur Blair (Orwell was his pen name) was born to British civil servants in India, a member of what he called the lower-upper-middle class. A deeply moral thinker and writer, Orwell didnt sit comfortably in his privilegebut was a committed democratic socialist, along the lines of a Bernie Sanders, as Yetur describes him. He was also, Ulin says, a brilliant critic of pre-World War II British liberal isolationism.

So when war broke out in Spain, Orwell saw it as his moral duty to get involved. When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct, Orwell wrote. He was shot in the throat by a fascist sniper and nearly died.

His experience in the Spanish Civil War also wised Orwell up to thefailures of Soviet communism, whose tactics of oppression and obfuscation mirrored those of the fascists the communists were fighting despite existing on opposite ends of the political spectrum. The opposing ideologies were two sides of the same totalitarian coin, each flavor of undemocratic authoritarian control intolerable to Orwell. He was very wary of totalitarianism from the left as well as from the right, Ulin says.

Orwells experience in the Spanish Civil War crystallized his politics, which formed the literary fabric of everything he would write thereafter.

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Sales of the dystopian classic '1984' have soared since Donald Trump's inauguration.(Photo: Signet)

Newspeak. Doublethink. Thoughtcrime. Big Brother.

1984 is often reduced to its base components, the catchphrases and slogans of the fictional government in Orwells dystopian allegory for Soviet totalitarianism. The takeaway is often: Oppression bad, liberty good.

But Orwells book is much more sophisticated. Orwell was interested not just in communicating the badness of totalitarian regimesbut also dissecting how they succeed through the manipulation of language.

He was really most concerned with language and how language was used in a propaganda type of way or as a means of control, Yetur says.

Orwell observed that totalitarian governments, whatever their ideologies, cannot simply impose their wills; they must indoctrinate. Their success requires complicity. Hes really sharp on the ways in which people get indoctrinated, Ulin says.

Which brings us to the term Orwellian. If Hawleys book deal getting canceled and Trump getting booted from Twitter arent Orwellian, what is?

'Orwellian, in the most orthodox way, is about language as a means of control, Yetur says. A Nazi propagandist like Leni Riefenstahl, that would be very Orwellian, because thats somebody whos using words to invoke feelings, to invoke allegiances, to discredit enemies."

Orwellian is not just applicable to the fascists and communists of Orwells era, though. Ulin believes 1984 is relevant to our political moment. There are aspects of the novel that are quite reminiscent, interestingly enough, of Trumpism, even though (Trumps) right-wing, Ulin says. Things like the dissemination of false information, the use of information to obfuscate rather than illuminate.

He also sees shades of 1984 in social media. In the book, Orwell invents Two Minutes Hate, a daily event in which video of the enemy is publicly screened and the audience is encouraged to stir itself up into a froth of rage. That kinds of reminds me of what we see in terms of social media mob mentality, and this extreme QAnon type of conspiracy theorists, Ulin says, working on peoples most negative and virulent emotions and using that as a way to control them but also to make them feel as if they are being heard.

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1984 and Animal Farm are Orwells greatest hits and certainly worth revisiting (or reading for the first time; we wont judge). But Orwell was also a prolific essayist, literary critic, journalist and columnist, and much of his best work is in his less flashy nonfiction. If you want to expand your understanding of Orwell and better appreciate the philosophy of one of our most enduring modern political writers, these works are good starting points.

Homage to Catalonia: Published in 1938, this personal account of Orwells experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War is essential to understanding every work that followed. If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: To Fight against Fascism, Orwell wrote, and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: Common decency.

Down and Out in Paris and London: Orwell lived in purposeful poverty for a time in Paris and London, two of the worlds wealthiest cities, and wrote about his experiences in this 1933 memoir. He made the choice to go to Paris and London and work low-end jobs and live that life, to immerse in it, because thats where his sympathies were, says Ulin.

Politics and the English Language:This 1946 essay is a short and essential read on the importance of clarity of language. It was central to both Orwells writing and politics, because he saw the two inextricably linked. Corrupt language, Orwell wrote, can also corrupt thought. Political language and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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You may be using the term Orwellian wrong. Heres what George Orwell was actually writing about - USA TODAY